07.22.07
Posted in entertainment, tech at 11:26 am by mridley
After posting my previous entry on the availability of Unbox purchases directly from TiVo, I did get a notice on my TiVo screen announcing that feature. I also have received a message letting me know about the availability of the TiVo Mobile application for Verizon wireless cell phones.
I won’t be checking this out, as I don’t have a Verizon wireless cell phone; I’m part of the Cingular/AT&T camp. I don’t understand why something like mobile TiVo scheduling needs to be a proprietary application. Why not make a slimmed down mobile HTML site so that all wireless users could schedule their programs remotely.
I’ve not tried the TiVo Central site from my Blackberry 8700c, but I suspect that if it works at all the experience will be difficult. My bank recently launched a mobile banking web site that works great. I don’t understand why my bank can provide me financial services without a special application but my TiVo can’t let me schedule recordings the same way.
Tags: TiVo
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07.21.07
Posted in books at 12:20 pm by mridley
I finally got around to updating my current reading selection. Unfortunately I’m really busy these days and don’t have time to do as much reading as I’d like. I’ve had a copy of Swann’s Way on my shelf for a while. I’m not sure that Proust is the best “light reading” but since I’ve been putting it off for years already I may as well do something about reading it. We’ll see how that goes.
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07.20.07
Posted in tech at 6:09 pm by mridley
One of the UNIX labs I’ve recently started managing is filled with SunBlade 1000 workstations. These are nice machines, but they’re a few years old and it will be time to replace them in the not too distant future. We have some evaluation SUN Ultra 40 workstations which we are starting to test. The units we have are really nice; dual processor dual core AMD CPUs with 8 GB of RAM and nVidia Quaddro FX4500 graphics cards. They would make great contemporary replacements for our aging SUN infrastructure.
The only problem is that this would entail an architecture shift from SPARC to x86. Our server infrastructure is Solaris on SPARC and I’d like to stick with Solaris for the workstations as well. Unfortunately I’m not sure about the state of Solaris x86 support for our applications. I suspect many of them are supported under Linux, but I don’t think they are all supported under Solaris x86.
I had read a while back that SUN was coming out with a Linux binary compatibility layer for Solaris x86, so I was thinking I could run whatever was not natively supported in Solaris x86 under the Linux binary support.
Unfortunately it seems not to be so cut and dry. There is the lxrun application which will run Linux applications “natively” inside of Solaris, but it seems to be deprecated and is only supported with the runtime libraries from ancient versions of RedHat Linux. This won’t work for our purposes, as we need contemporary versions.
There is another project called BrandZ which allows you to run a Linux userspace environment inside of a Solaris zone. This is more promising but still a little heavier weight than what I wanted. Nevertheless, I think it’s the best option so it’s something we will be playing with.
One idea we have is to setup two child zones, one Solaris and one BrandZ/Linux, and have the root zone run an XDMCP chooser to allow login to either Linux or Solaris from the workstation. I have no idea how well that is going to work, but we’ll try it and I’ll post an update with our results.
Tags: Solaris, Lxrun, BrandZ, Linux
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07.11.07
Posted in entertainment, media at 7:09 pm by mridley
I didn’t see an announcement on my TiVo about this, but I received an email from Amazon letting me know that I can set up a PIN to purchase Amazon Unbox content directly on my TiVo. I tried this out and it does indeed work. I think this is going to make Amazon Unbox all the more popular. I know it will drive my usage of it. Sometimes I’m watching TiVo and someone references a movie and I think, “Oh I want to watch that.” This will drive impulse purchases of that content if I can pause what I’m watching and grab the movie directly from my TiVo.
Unfortunately the available content for Unbox on TiVo is still pretty limited, but hopefully that will change down the road.
Tags: TiVo, Amazon, Unbox
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